Covering a Cake With Fondant

There are a couple of things I've said I'd never attempt to show using still photos: piping drop strings and covering a cake in fondant. I figured one of these days I'd recruit my husband to play videographer and have him record me doing these techniques that rely on motion more than most. Well, today I was covering a cake with chocolate fondant, and I figured I'd snap a few shots and try to convey the steps involved. Perhaps a video will be forthcoming, but in the meantime, here's what I do. 

The VERY first step is to bake a cake, level it, tort it, ice it, and chill it. The fondant goes on best when the icing underneath ("undercoating") isn't squishy. Also, don't ice the cake all the way to the base; leave a margin of a little less than half an inch. You'll avoid icing squishing out at the base when you get to the step of cutting away the slack. So, here's the setup I use: a sifter loaded with powdered sugar (the fondant may need it if it's very sticky), a teaspoon or so of Crisco (if the fondant is dry and crumbly, you can knead some in), a fondant smoother, a small pizza wheel or a sharp knife, a rolling pin (I prefer the Wilton Wide Glide Rolling Pin), a ruler, and a mat (I like the Wilton Roll-N-Cut Mat; it's essential for rolling out the right size for the cake). 

There are sets of rolling pin guide rings available that take all the guesswork out of rolling out the correct thickness of fondant. I almost always use the medium-thickness orange ones.

I dampen the counter under the mat with a spray bottle of water or a paper towel. This keeps the mat from sliding around.

Measure the cake up one side, across the surface, and down the other side. Add about three inches for "slop", and that's the size of circle you'll want to roll out.

Sprinkle your mat with some powdered sugar. Be prepared to use more after each flip of the fondant. 

 Dust the rolling pin with powdered sugar, and roll the fondant out much as you would cookie dough. Start from the center and work your way out. Flip the fondant frequently, and re-dust the mat and rolling pin as often as necessary (like if the fondant starts to stick to either).

A few cracks are no big deal. If they don't smooth out after a few flips, however, you might need to start over. Knead a little bit of Crisco into the fondant. The right consistency is just one of those things you'll be able to recognize more quickly with practice.

I apologize for the lack of quality in these photos. Juggling the phone and the rolling pin with my hands covered in powdered sugar and Crisco was no easy task, and I just couldn't turn off the flash.

At this point photography became impossible. I have yet to master the technique of rolling the fondant up around the pin without it sticking to itself (you see this method all the time on Cake Boss) so I slide my hands under the fondant almost all the way up to the elbow…

…and then drape it evenly across the cake.

Initially, I smooth my hands across the top and down the sides to the base…

And then I smooth it even more evenly with the fondant smoother. I haven't had air bubbles plague me yet; they can be pricked with a pin at an angle and flattened out with the smoother if they occur.

Be sure to smooth the fondant as close as possible at the base…

…before running the pizza cutter or knife around to cut away the slack. Wrap the excess fondant tightly in plastic wrap twice, then store it in a plastic container away from heat and light. At this point, don't put this cake in the fridge or cover it; stash it in a cupboard away from temperature extremes. All there is to do now is decorate and eat it! 

Fondant Records for a Sock Hop

Today I made a batch of cupcakes for a sock hop. For those of you for whom the term "sock hop" was before your time, in the 1950's it became a cultural phenomenon in America to hold high school dances in either the gym or the cafeteria, and the dancers were required to remove their shoes to protect the varnished floor. The music was either provided by a live band, but more often by a DJ spinning records (the 1950's equivalent of MP3s). Coastal Repertory Theatre in Half Moon Bay held a sock hop tonight to promote their new show The Marvelous Wonderettes, which features lots of music by girl groups from the '50s and '60s, so I was inspired to make these cupcakes. By the way, the colors of the "record labels" and the pearls (edible, of course) are a nod of the head to the dresses the four actresses in the show are wearing; aren't they cute?:

Here's how I got this project going:

That's a pile of powdered sugar, a rolling pin fitted with purple rings, 2 golfballs worth of pink fondant, a smallish circle-shaped cutter, and the thin-point modeling stick from the Wilton gum paste tool set (I'm sure a skewer or a small awl would do). I powdered the work surface and rolled out the fondant:

I figured I was making 24 cupcakes and using four colors for centers, so I cut out 7 circles (one extra in case I had some sort of mishap later):

Then I used the modeling stick to make a hole in the center of each circle:

And then I put all the pink circles under plastic wrap so they wouldn't dry out. You can see the other three colors already cut out with layers of plastic between them, resting under the pink layer:

Now it's time to make the black vinyl part of the record. I used that batch of dark chocolate fondant from scratch I made the other day, colored it (and my hands) black, and rolled it out. Here's one of the circles being cut out:

Then I used the orange shell tool from the gum paste set to carve some grooves into the vinyl. I'm sure there are more elegant ways of achieving this effect, but this worked sufficiently, considering how much of the "vinyl" would be covered up by the "label."

I dabbed some water onto the backs of the "labels" using a water pen, and stuck them onto the "vinyl." As you may know, a little bit of water around fondant is OK; it acts like glue or a glaze, depending on what you're doing with it; steam will give fondant a gorgeous sheen, if it's done lightly (or turn it into a soupy mess, if it's done heavy-handedly). In general, fondant and water (and moisture in general) don't mix.

I then drove the modeling stick through both layers so the center hole would go all the way through:

And I laid all the "records" on cookie racks covered in parchment paper to firm up and dry overnight:

The next day, an unacceptable amount of surface noise (powdered sugar) remained on the black fondant; sometimes it will absorb, as it did on the colored fondant. So I proceeded to lightly paint away all the powdered sugar with a barely-damp angled brush dipped in water:

Here's a record that's been painted with water half way:

And here's the whole batch, looking all nice and shiny (this took longer than I'd anticipated, because of course I had to paint the reverse sides with water, too):

After I frosted the cupcakes (using a large star tip #1M and two cans of vanilla store-bought frosting) and sprinkled them with "pearls", I let them firm up in the fridge for a while. My plan was to stick the records into the frosting and cupcakes vertically, and I wanted to make sure the frosting was up for the challenge:

When I got to the sock hop, I put them together along with this sign, as it occurred to me a lot of the young folks might not know what records are, and their parents might not "get" that these cupcakes are 100% edible; it would have been devastating to find out that most of the records were left on the table uneaten or had been tossed in the trash:

Also, earlier in the day after I'd glossed out the powdered sugar with water, I used thinned royal icing and a small round #2 tip to write an abbreviation of "The Marvelous Wonderettes" on the "labels"; too bad I couldn't fit in the whole name! Maybe if I'd been making 12" LPs…

Chocolate Fondant From Scratch

The first time I tried to adapt the fondant from scratch recipe to be chocolate, the result was a total toss-out; completely unsalvageable garbage fondant. About a year ago I figured out what I did wrong, and guess what: I forgot to write down the recipe. However, it apparently was rattling around somewhere in my brain because I just pulled the ingredients together, and I think I have it more or less down. The ingredients are mostly the same as regular fondant (powdered sugar, glycerine, gelatine, corn syrup, vanilla, Crisco). The main difference is, of course, chocolate. I'm partial to Hershey's Special Dark, which is unsweetened. The other difference is the vanilla; with regular fondant you can use any flavor you want. With the chocolate I'd recommend vanilla, but you could probably use peppermint or go in some other direction with it.

All of the steps and measurements are the same as for the regular fondant recipe, with the exception of the first one. Start by putting a large sifter into a large bowl, and pour about 3/4 of a 2-pound bag of powdered sugar into it. I use a scale to get this weight as accurate as possible. Then, remove about a cup of sugar from the middle of the powdered sugar in the sifter; I used a measuring cup. Then put 4 oz. (half of the 8 oz. package of cocoa) in its place like this:

Sift the sugar and cocoa together into the bowl and form a hole in the middle:

Prepare the liquid ingredients (gelatine, water, corn syrup, glycerine, vanilla) according to the fondant from scratch recipe and pour them into the hole:

Start stirring; it's hard to describe how sticky this mixture will get:

It may seem like all the ingredients will never incorporate with each other but eventually they'll go from that to this:

You may find it's handy to have a long, dull knife like a dinner knife handy to scrape the sides of the bowl. A rubber spatula is just too floppy for this job. Scrape as much as you can into one complete ball, and dump it into the middle of a pile of powdered sugar sifted over your work area. You'll probably use all of that cup you removed earlier from the sifter and then some:

It's hard to imagine that powdery wad of stuff could ever evolve into something beautiful, huh? Smear your palms with about half a teaspoon of Crisco and work it in. Eventually, you'll have this sort of marbled mass that can be easily handled…

…and in no time at all you'll have this gorgeous deep brown fondant in your hand; not sticky at all:

 At this point you absolutely must sample it. I think you'll be pretty impressed! It'll probably be all you can do to not roll this out to cover a cake with it immediately, but it really should rest a while to cool off; that's a whole other project. Double wrap it with plastic wrap, and put it in a tightly sealed container away from heat and light.

As you can see, it weighs just over 30 ounces, definitely enough to cover 2 two-layer 8" or 9" cakes. I used one batch to cover the cake at the top of this post, and this one:

I'll use this batch I just made in a project soon and post the results here. No matter what it looks like, I'm pretty sure it will be yummy!